Award Data

Under sponsorship of the Air Force SBIR program, the small business Advanced Fuel Research, Inc. (AFR) is developing an innovative sensor system to map the surface temperature of thermal barrier coated (TBC) turbine blades during operational testing of advanced military jet engines. Temperature mapping is a high priority capability needed to prove ceramic coatings as a reliable means to prevent bl ...

Gas turbine engine development requires sensors to measure gas path properties in engines during ground testing.  The data collected with these sensors are critical to the development of advanced engines with high performance, high efficiency, and low emissions.  While instrumentation is available to measure most of the important gas path properties, the drive toward higher turbine inlet tempera ...

The drumbeat for higher efficiency gas turbine engines is driving new designs capable of operating at higher temperatures and pressure ratios, in fewer stages, and with higher airfoil loads.   These conditions pose a great challenge for turbomachinery designers.  They must now accurately predict airfoil metal temperatures to design effective cooling schemes that counter the high external gas te ...

The goal of the Phase II project is to develop a prototype of the Marine Acoustic Propagation System (MAPS). MAPS is a computer system designed in a client-server archi9tecture that provides NOAA marine scientists, who do not have an extensive background in underwater acoustics, with a tool that selects the appropriate acoustic model for estimating underwater propagation loss for anthropogenic no ...

The proposed effort will demonstrate the suitability of a mature commercial production technology in meeting the requirements for a cost effective, high capacity non-volatile memory solution for space systems.  The feasibility of mitigating radiation sensitivities in, and improving the reliability of, devices built upon the selected technology will be demonstrated during Phase 1.  We will develo ...

Functional taggants are paints or inks that change their optical properties in response to specified environmental conditions, such as the presence of a chemical related to illicit weapon activities. In this project, we will develop taggant systems for two non-conventional weapon signatures. Taggants will have high chemical selectivity (avoids false positives), high chemical affinity (avoids flase ...

ABSTRACT: We propose to employ a novel Boundary Element Method (BEM) numerical technique, demonstrated during Phase I, to develop a parallel computer code that will allow simultaneous solution, in three dimensions (3-D), of the vacuum magnetic vector potential and magnetic field structure for complex geometries. The primary advantages of the chosen approach are the reduction of the dimensionality ...

The NIST patented six-degree of freedom micropositioner technology associated with this subtopic has been identified by E M Optomechanical, Inc. (EMOM) as a technology that could be incorporated into the company¿s long-working distance interference microscopes. A key element in these microscopes is a piezo-actuator device, installed in a manual pitch/yaw mount, which translates a small flat mirro ...

The objective of the proposed research is the demonstration of an optimized, planar-constrained Ionic Polymer-Metal Composite (IPMC) under the influence of a low, O(10V), voltage signal as a conformal surface capable of actuation of a laminar/transitional boundary layer for the goals of transition and/or separation control. The material will be modeled using standard techniques for analyzing a st ...

Many aircraft are hardened against the effects of various forms of high power electromagnetic waves, including Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), High Power Microwaves (HPM), High Intensity Radio Frequency (HIRF), and lightning. These aircraft typically have electrically conducting coatings on their windows, with conducting gaskets that form an electromagnetic seal with the fuselage. These gaskets wear ...